Welcome to 2014

Written by Jesse Beaumont

A big, hearty ShinobiControls welcome to 2014! I hope you all had a wonderful and restful break over the holidays and wish you all the very best for the year to come.

At ShinobiHQ we’re already back in the saddle and getting organised for what promises to be a very busy few months. We’re working on another release of our UI component suite for iOS, further releases of the Android charting library and a couple of ideas for ShinobiLabs (including a much requested calendar control).

That’s just the tip of the iceberg though, we’ve got some really exciting new stuff up our sleeves. The ideas are still percolating so it’s too early to share much detail but suffice to say we’re looking to add some pretty mighty new tools to your app development toolbox. With these new toolsets we’ll be taking a big swing at some pretty big blind spots in native mobile app development as we see them.

We’ve spent the last couple of months consulting with many of our customers to learn more about your pain points, what’s causing issues and where we can help and I’d like to extend a massive thank you to all of you who came back with feedback and took the time to have a conversation. It has been tremendously helpful and has really helped focus our thinking. Over the coming weeks and months we will be sharing more details about these products and will be looking for some beta users so if you’re interested, be sure to keep your eyes peeled and let us know. In the meantime, if you would like to have a conversation about ShinobiControls, our plans, things we can help with or share any feedback you have, please don’t hesitate to get in touch and we can set something up.

Meanwhile, one thing that has become clear over the course of lots of discussions both one-on-one and at trade shows and conferences is that many people are grappling with some pretty big decisions around their mobile development strategy. For example, how is mobile best used – where does it add most value, native app or HTML5 app, build or buy, cross platform or single platform, and more?

Given that we have a fair bit of experience in this area, we thought it might be useful for us to share our thinking about this stuff. We’ll be doing that through a series of free articles over the coming weeks and months. The plan is to focus on some of these big picture, strategic questions and just explore the different topics a little bit each in its own article. We’ll obviously be posting them on our site, but If you think that might be useful to you, register your interest here and we’ll get back to you when the first part is ready to go. Should you have a particular question on your mind that you’re looking for some input on, tell us about it and we can see if we can give you our thoughts.

We’re also going to be at Apps World in San Francisco in February so if you’re attending the event or even just if you’re in the area, and you’d like to meet up, let us know!

So with that, it’s time for me to get to work. All the best for 2014 from the whole ShinobiControls team!